Now that Furthur guitarist John Kadlecik is touring with Phil Lesh and Friends, this seemed an opportune time to present this piece written by his fellow Maryland resident Tony Beers.
Photo by Vernon Webb
The Grateful Dead, the San Francisco rock band of epic psychedelic coolness breathes a little easier these days.
The late Jerry Garcia, the band’s guitar player who died in 1995, may have sighed some relief himself In 2009 when mild-mannered guitarist John Kadlecik quietly stepped in, saddled up, and went on the road with the rock icon’s former bandmates, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh.
At the time Kadlecik was minding his own business playing, singing, and recreating the music of The Grateful Dead for thousands of his own adoring fans with the very successful and well-known tribute band he co-founded, Dark Star Orchestra. On an incessant tour schedule throughout the country, surpassed only by the band he emulated, one would think that he would have had his hands full; but just as a minor league baseball player lives for that call from the majors, he answered and headed off to California and a meeting with his idols at their Club Front studios in San Rafael.
Although speaking with John via phone I could hear his excitement over the phone as he talked about creating new material while listening for his own voice, interpreting The Dead’s vast repertoire and his work with Furthur. I began to see more than just a rock star grateful to be able to have fun playing music and getting paid for it (as many artists will admit to). This guy has the humility of a true journeyman. A student of improvisation, Kadlecik works at purveying his goods through live performance and he studies his craft as it unfolds within him.
Kadlecik’s early childhood commitment to music and classical training on the violin, which he picked up at the age of eight, shows in his ease and proficiency on the guitar today. We talked about his musical influences: Camper Van Beethoven, Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, Jimmy Page, David Gilmore. But it was jazz and the modern psychedelic rock movement that ultimately shaped his career the most.
While he has played with a number of bands (Hairball Willie, Uncle John’s Band, Wing Nut, The Mix w/Melvin Seals), it was Dark Star that helped to establish him as one of today’s foremost improvisational/jam band guitarists.
DSO has been exhaustive in its musical attention to re-creating past Grateful Dead performances using their original set lists. These lists, spanning 30 years, incredibly were never repeated in the same order, nor were the songs played in the quite the same way from one night to the next. What is significant and most often misunderstood about The Dead is that the improvisational nature of the music itself made each song a movement within a larger body of music that was never exactly duplicated. The enormity of the challenge facing Kadlecik and DSO, with over 2000 live Dead shows recorded, was to find that unique sound as a collective musical mind, but also to capture the feel and expression of the band and their epic improvisational repertoire.
“I wanted to look at each individual set list as its own artistic opus, to learn the bigger brush stroke changes that happened in the songs over time,” he said. “DSO was never at any time a note-for-note band. What we did was individually learn our parallel roles, emulating an individual musician in the band and learning how to take a loose structure and fill it out in the same way they might have, not to reproduce a particular show. We strove to play a show as if we could go back in time and they could replay it. The jams would be shorter or longer than theirs were on a given day — we tried to constrain our palettes but not constrain our brushstrokes.”
By all accounts they have accomplished this amazing feat. Dark Star’s unprecedented rise through a sea of talented jambands has given fans worldwide a clinic on a unique brand of music birthed by The Dead and their extraordinary body of work.
I asked John what the biggest difference has been between DSO and playing with “the boys” in the original band.
“Well, in many ways, Dark Star was like being perpetually in university . . . in an academic environment for a bunch of musicians and throwing a good party – whereas going into Further was like getting a real job . . . to make art. I’m not choosing my own curriculum anymore,” he said.
I asked him about his first Grateful Dead experience: “It was a big influence. I saw my first Dead show and it’s, like, you listen to the albums, and the songs are there and even good recordings and good performances, but they sound like classic rock recordings,” he said. “The live show was like cutting edge now … I thought, this is post rock, this is beyond rock and roll, beyond jazz, beyond anything — it’s ‘now’ music! It’s technically, sonically and visually completely cutting edge, and musically they were always striving to be in the moment.”
Asked if he ever made a concerted effort to play like Jerry Garcia in some of his earlier bands, he said that he never intentionally looked at staying within that influence until DSO.
Our conversation turned to the subtleties and source of musical improvisation.
“There is an aspect in improvisation, to me, that’s about the interface of the ‘other world’ with the ‘causal world’ — the fact is, science really has no clue about human volition and where that comes from,” Kadlecik said. “Improvisational music explores these boundaries that a lot of people take for granted. They assume it comes from within themselves, but nobody really knows . . . . It’s a potent space, magical territory. In The Dead vernacular, ‘the music plays the band,’ and that’s a place we’ve all gotten to, wherever it is that that stuff comes from . . . we all get connected to the same source of it.”
I wondered about his current plans with Furthur, the ever-present rumors that Phil Lesh was preparing to step down, and questions surrounding how long he, Phil and Bob Weir plan to play music together.
Kadlecik answered matter-of-factly. “It goes until it doesn’t anymore, which is true for everything in music. Nothing is forever. Phil recently told an interviewer that he and Bob were in agreement that I’m the guy they want to play with for the foreseeable future. That could change tomorrow.
“Musicians don’t wind down. Musicians don’t retire – except once in a while, like Grace Slick [of Jefferson Airplane] (laughs) who had somehow gotten an idea in her head that rock and roll is a game for the young. I believe improvisation is something people get better at with age,” he said. “Whatever you lose in technical dexterity due to age you gain tenfold in taste.”
When not touring with Furthur, Kadlecik devotes himself to his own ensemble, The John K Band (wife Katy plays percussion). Playing original compositions alongside Dead standards, he exudes the same energy, passion and talent that defined DSO and shines in Furthur.
“I get the impression that this band [JKB] is fresh, but not altogether new,” I said. Kadlecik reminded me that his whole career over the last 20 years has been an ongoing process of working on his own songs while contributing to others’ original material. “JKB is really the natural outcome of that progression,” he said. “It’s picking up where Hairball Willie, Wing Nut, and The Mix and DSO left off.”
The interview cemented my instinct that Kadlecik’s career has not reached its zenith yet. A week later, I ran into his friend and photographer, Gabriel Jones, outside a Furthur show near Philadelphia, grinning from ear to ear.
“Tony, Furthur was absolutely amazing tonight; they’re at the top of their game. But I believe The John K Band is the band to watch. I mean, this guy wakes up every day with greatness without even trying! The thing that’s different about John, though, is that he’s not in your face about it. He wouldn’t know the first thing about putting on false airs. And he knows who he is,” Gabriel continued. “John’s solid, know what I mean? See, it’s like this: the dude’s got talent. Everybody knows that — but John’s really cool too, so of course his future is bright.”
